Topic Page

Nation Topics - Religion

Articles

News and Features

They call us "self-hating" Jews when we raise criticisms of Israeli policies. Yet most of those Jews who risk this calumny as the
cost of getting involved actually feel a special resonance with the
history and culture of the Jews--because this is a people who have
proclaimed a message of love, justice and peace; they feel a special
pride in being part of a people who have insisted on the possibility of
tikkun, a Hebrew word expressing a belief that the world can be
fundamentally healed and transformed. A Los Angeles Times poll in 1988
found that some 50 percent of Jews polled identified "a commitment to
social equality" as the characteristic most important to their Jewish
identity. Only 17 percent cited a commitment to Israel. No wonder, then,
that social-justice-oriented American Jews today feel betrayed by
Israeli policies that seem transparently immoral and self-destructive.

Social justice Jews are not apologists for Palestinian violence. We are
outraged by the immoral acts of Palestinian terrorists who blow up
Israelis at Seder tables, or while they shop, or sit in cafes, or ride
in buses. We know that these acts of murder cannot be excused. But many
of us also understand that Israeli treatment of Palestinians has been
immoral and outrageous. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled their
homes in 1948, and recent research by Israeli historians has shown most
fled not because they were responding to the appeal of Arab leaders but
because they feared acts of violence by right-wing Israeli terrorists or
were forced from their homes by the Israeli army. Palestinian refugees
and their families now number more than 3 million, and many live in
horrifying conditions in refugee camps under Israeli military rule.

Despite its oral promises at Oslo to end its occupation of the
Palestinian territories by 1998, Israel actually increased the number of
West Bank settlers from about 120,000 in 1993 to 200,000 by the time
Prime Minister Ehud Barak met with Yasir Arafat at Camp David. And
although the Israeli and US media bought the myth that what was offered
to Palestinians there was "the best they could ever expect," and that
their rejection of the offer was proof that they wanted nothing less
than the full destruction of Israel, the facts show quite a different
story. Not only did Barak offer Arafat less than had been promised in
1993 but he refused to provide anything in the way of reparations or
compensation for the refugees. Instead, he insisted that Arafat sign a
statement saying that the terms being offered by Barak would end all
claims by the Palestinian people against Israel and would represent a
resolution of all outstanding issues. No Palestinian leader could have
signed that agreement and abandoned the needs of those refugees.

Though it is popularly thought that negotiations broke off there, they
continued at Taba until Ariel Sharon's election ended the process,
which, according to then-Justice Minister Yossi Beilin, was very close
to arriving at a full agreement between the two peoples. Sharon did not
want that agreement because he has always opposed any deal that would
involve abandoning the West Bank settlements, which he had helped expand
in the 1980s--precisely to insure that Israel would never give up the
occupied territories. Using the excuse of responding to acts of terror
by some Palestinians, Sharon recently set out to destroy the
institutions of Palestinian society and has done so with murderous
brutality, with little regard for human rights and with great harm to
many civilians.

No wonder, then, that social-justice-oriented Jews are upset by Israeli
policies. They see that the policies are leading to a frightening
upsurge in anti-Semitism. And far from providing security for Israel,
they are creating new generations of terrorists and convincing the world
that Israel has lost its moral compass.

Still, many Jews and non-Jews have been intimidated by the intense

campaign being waged by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee
(AIPAC) and by other Jewish organizations. These groups label those
critical of Israel "self-hating" if they are Jewish or anti-Semitic if
they are not and mobilize large amounts of money to defeat candidates
deemed insufficiently pro-Israel. Ethically sensitive non-Jews are
vulnerable to the manipulation of guilt about the long and bloody
history of anti-Semitism in Christian Europe and Islamic north Africa,
plus the US refusal of entry to Jews seeking asylum from the Nazis in
the 1940s. There is ample reason for the non-Jewish world to atone for
its past oppression of Jews. But non-Jews are doing no favors to the
Jewish people when by their silence they help the most destructive
elements of the Jewish world pursue immoral policies that almost
certainly will generate more hatred of Jews.

It is time for the United States to sponsor a multinational force to
physically separate and protect Israel and Palestine from each other,
and then to convene an international conference to impose a final
settlement. This would include an end to the occupation, evacuation of
the settlements, reparations for Palestinian refugees (and also for Jews
who fled Arab lands), recognition of Israel by surrounding Arab states
and cessation of all acts of terror and violence. Imposing that kind of
a settlement, by force if necessary, would provide real security to both
sides and open up psychic space for the healing that must happen. What
is called for is a new spirit of generosity, open-heartedness,
repentance and reconciliation between two peoples who share equally the
blame for the current mess and who both have legitimate grievances that
must now be left behind for the sake of lasting peace....

This is a goal of thousands of American Jews and our non-Jewish allies
who have recently formed the Tikkun Community, a progressive, pro-Israel
alternative to AIPAC. Israel/Palestine peace is not only a Jewish issue;
our non-Jewish allies will be essential to our campaign to educate the
media, opinion shapers and elected officials. The nonviolent civil
disobedience sponsored by the Tikkun Community at the State Department
in April, at which Cornel West and I were arrested, is only one part of
a campaign that will include lobbying, teach-ins, fasting, sending
volunteers to be part of an international presence on the West Bank,
collecting funds to rebuild Palestinian cities (and Israeli sites
destroyed by Palestinian terror attacks) and demands on Jewish and Arab
institutions to adopt a path of nonviolence. We are also creating a
national student conference in October. Many students face an impossible
choice between pro-Israel groups that support Sharon's current policies
in lockstep or pro-Palestinian groups that claim the Palestinians are
facing Nazi-like genocide at the hands of the Jewish people (an
exaggeration that allows right-wing Jews to yell "anti-Semitism" because
there is no attempt to systematically murder Palestinians, thereby
letting Israel off the hook).

Our goal, both on campuses and in the larger society, is to forge a
middle path of "tough love" for Israel--recognizing that the best way to
protect Israel and the Jewish people is to use the power of the
international community to impose a settlement and end the occupation.
That's the path for true self-affirming Jews and non-Jews who care
enough about their Jewish brothers and sisters to get involved.

Two Palestinian-Israeli wars have erupted in this region. One is the Palestinian nation's war for its freedom from occupation and for its right to independent statehood. Any decent person ought to support this cause. The second war is waged by fanatical Islam, from Iran to Gaza and from Lebanon to Ramallah, to destroy Israel and drive the Jews out of their land. Any decent person ought to abhor this cause.

Yasir Arafat and his men are running both wars simultaneously, pretending they are one. The suicide killers evidently make no distinction. Much of the worldwide bafflement about the Middle East, much of the confusion among the Israelis themselves, stems from the overlap between these two wars. Decent peace seekers, in Israel and elsewhere, are often drawn into simplistic positions. They either defend Israel's continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza by claiming that Israel has been targeted by Muslim holy war ever since its foundation in 1948, or else they vilify Israel on the grounds that nothing but the occupation prevents a just and lasting peace. One simplistic argument allows Palestinians to kill all Israelis on the basis of their natural right to resist occupation. An equally simplistic counterargument allows Israelis to oppress all Palestinians because an all-out Islamic jihad has been launched against them.

Two wars are being fought in this region. One is a just war, and the other is both unjust and futile.

Israel must step down from the war on the Palestinian territories. It must begin to end occupation and evacuate the Jewish settlements that were deliberately thrust into the depths of Palestinian lands. Its borders must be drawn, unilaterally if need be, upon the logic of demography and the moral imperative to withdraw from governing a hostile population.

But would an end to occupation terminate the Muslim holy war against Israel? This is hard to predict. If jihad comes to an end, both sides would be able to sit down and negotiate peace. If it does not, we would have to seal and fortify Israel's logical border, the demographic border, and keep fighting for our lives against fanatical Islam.

If, despite simplistic visions, the end of occupation will not result in peace, at least we will have one war to fight rather than two. Not a war for our full occupancy of the holy land, but a war for our right to live in a free and sovereign Jewish state in part of that land. A just war, a no-alternative war. A war we will win. Like any people who were ever forced to fight for their very homes and freedom and lives.

Was it lack of space or was it lack of time that made Katha Pollitt so bland and lenient about the current state of religious leadership in our country and our culture ["God Changes Everything," April 1]? She mentioned the obvious degeneration of the Roman Catholic Church into a protection racket for child rapists, true. She also instanced the way in which Judaism has become prostituted to the uses of messianic colonialism in Palestine. But this is merely to tinker with the problem. What about Billy Graham, who has been Protestant father-confessor to every President from Eisenhower to Clinton, and who has achieved the status of America's mainstream cleric?

Let's say there was a school system or a chain of clinics on whose professional staff were a certain number of men who molested the children in their care and who, whenever this behavior came to the attention of their superiors, were shifted to another school or clinic, with parents and colleagues, not to mention the justice system, kept in the dark whenever possible. Imagine that this practice continued for thirty years through a combination of out-of-court settlements, sympathetic judges and politicians, stonewalling lawyers, suppression of information, fulminations against the media. Don't you think that when the story finally broke, the men who had made and implemented the policy would be held legally responsible--for something? Certainly they would lose their jobs.

Bring God into the picture, though, and everything changes. The bishops who presided over the priestly pedophilia in the Catholic Church's ever-expanding scandal are not likely to follow Boston's Father Geoghan, convicted and sentenced to nine to ten years and facing more charges, into the dock, much less the cellblock. After all, they are men of God. Thanks to God, the Catholic Church can run a healthcare system--10 percent of private hospitals in the United States--that refuses to practice modern medicine where women are concerned: not just no abortion but also no birth control, no emergency contraception for rape victims, no sterilization, no in vitro fertilization. The church can agitate against the use of condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS, even in desperate Africa, a position as insane as South African President Thabo Mbeki's stance against antiretroviral AIDS drugs, but that generates a lot less outrage in the West. It can lobby in Ireland against allowing suicidal women to have abortions and intimidate a 14-year-old rape victim in Mexico into carrying to term; it can practice total sex discrimination, barring women from the priesthood and therefore from sharing in the political life of the church, and still demand to be taken seriously when it speaks of human rights or ethics--rather like the Philadelphia parochial school recently reported as giving academic extra credit to students who march in antiabortion-rights demonstrations even as the church goes after public funding through vouchers. No secular institution could get away with any of this, any more than a secular psychotherapist or family counselor could get away with telling poor mad Andrea Yates what the Protestant evangelist Michael Peter Woroniecki did: that Eve was a witch whose sin required atonement in the form of perfect motherhood and that working mothers are "wicked."

Another example: Let's say a group of Americans decide that they would like to live where they believe their ancestors lived 2,000 years ago, even though other people have been living there for centuries and don't like the idea one bit. If these people were Cajuns who wanted to park themselves in the Bois de Boulogne, everyone would think they were out of their minds. If they were American blacks taking over swatches of Ghana, people--including many black people--would laugh at their historical pretensions and militaristic grandiosity. It would certainly be a relevant point that these settlers are not displaced persons or refugees--they have perfectly good homes already. But once again, God changes everything: The former Brooklynites, Philadelphians and Baltimoreans now camping out in "Judea" and "Samaria" (the West Bank to you) wave the Bible and the Israeli government lavishes on them all sorts of privileges--cheaper mortgages, income tax breaks, business development and housing grants--with results that are disastrous for Israel and Palestinians alike and that now threaten the peace of the entire world. In a recent front-page story, the New York Times treated the longing of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza to return to their homes in Israel proper as a psychological obstacle to their forging any kind of rational future, individual or collective, and maybe it is-- maybe it would be better for them to forget the old homestead and demand reparations. But at least the old woman mourning a sewing machine left behind when she fled Beersheba fifty years ago really, personally owned that sewing machine; the family picnicking year after year in the ruins of its former property has living memories of farming that plot of land. It is not a notional "ancestral" possession supposedly guaranteed in perpetuity by God. In this case, the religious fanaticism is not coming from the Muslims.

Elsewhere, of course, it is. God has been particularly busy in the Islamic world, building madrassahs, issuing fatwas, bringing in Sharia with its bloody stumps and beheadings and floggings and stonings--seventeen people have been stoned to death so far under the "progressive" Khatami regime in Iran--and underwriting a wide variety of dictators and monarchs and warlords. When gods start multiplying, matters don't improve: Polytheistic Hindu zealots have slaughtered 700 people, including many children, in revenge for the torching by Muslims of a train carrying Hindus from the site of the Ayodhya mosque, destroyed by a Hindu mob in 1992 because it supposedly occupied the site where the god-king Ram was supposedly born. As I write, Hindu fanatics are threatening to fight Muslims for a strand of beard hair preserved in a Muslim shrine in Srinagar, which they claim belongs not to Mohammed but to Hindu religious leader Nimnath Baba. How many children will be burned to death over the proper attribution of that holy facial hair?

Think of all the ongoing conflicts involving religion: India versus Pakistan, Russia versus Chechnya, Protestants versus Catholics in Northern Ireland, Muslim guerrillas in the Philippines, bloody clashes between Christians and Muslims in Indonesia and Nigeria, civil war in Sudan and Uganda and Sri Lanka, in which last the Buddhist Sinhalese show a capacity for inflicting harm on the admittedly ferocious Hindu Tamils that doesn't get written up in Tricycle. It's enough to make one nostalgic for the cold war--as if the thin film of twentieth-century political ideology has been stripped away like the ozone layer to reveal a world reverting to seventeenth-century-style religious warfare, fought with twenty-first-century weapons. God changes everything.

Boston's Bernard Cardinal Law deserves the Watergate Award for Obfuscatory Declamation: He has characterized his nearly two decades of cover-up of felonies--namely, the rape and molestation of hundreds of Boston-area children by scores of priests--as "tragically incorrect." Records uncovered by the Boston Globe's Spotlight Team disclose the shocking extent to which Law's cold-shouldering of young victims made him an enabler of known recidivist pedophiles, including former priest John Geoghan, whose thirty-six-year spree of child sexual exploitation ended in a prison sentence on February 21.

Over and over, Law sought to pay hush money to victims of known molesters and then moved the predators to new parishes, where they once again had access to children. For years Law counted on the cooperation of several judges who, sharing his belief that the faith of rank-and-file church members might not survive a reckoning with the truth about the priestly criminals in their midst, moved to seal archdiocese files. Even as the child-rape stories were breaking, Law permitted his lawyers to pursue a defense based on "comparative negligence"--the theory that the abuse was partially due to victims' negligence.

Ever since Superior Court Judge Constance Sweeney's November ruling forced public release of documents detailing the crimes, the Cardinal's voice has had a from-the-bunker timbre. At his official residence, Law has been hunkered down with wealthy male advisers from Boston's Catholic elite--bankers, executives, university presidents and politicians who together calibrate the spin of each statement that issues from the Chancery. But sometimes a furious Law bursts through the kitchen-cabinet insulation: His Nixonian response to the news that nearly half of polled Boston Catholics want him to resign--including those faithful who keep a Law-Must-Go vigil in front of his residence--was to declare them enemies of the Church. His persistent disparagement of the Globe reporters who sued to unseal those documents is not a response to stress; it's his longstanding M.O. In 1992, after the Globe exposed Father James Porter as a serial rapist, the cosmopolitan Harvard-man Cardinal inveighed, "By all means, we call down God's power upon the media, particularly the Globe."

While the US Catholic Church has so far paid out $1 billion in settlements for clerical molestation cases, the predator priests are less emblems of fatal flaws in doctrine--including the doctrine of celibacy--than they are evidence of the mortal danger posed by any institutional leadership that perpetuates the myth that it is answerable to no laws but its own. (This presumption of immunity has taken an ominous new turn, as bishops across the country fling priests alleged to have molested from their jobs: As one Massachusetts picket sign reads: There Is No Due Process in Cardinal's Law.) Protestants have sustained public-relations catastrophes and paid huge sums for years of cover-ups: In December the Anglican Church of Canada announced that ten of its thirty dioceses are facing bankruptcy as a result of child sexual-abuse claims. Australian Governor General Peter Hollingworth faces mounting cries for his resignation since evidence surfaced that while he was an archbishop, he grossly mishandled cases of pedophilia. The children sexually exploited by Deacon Robert Tardy of Washington's Peace Baptist Church have never heard one word of apology from church authorities. Predators and their protectors are also ensconced within synagogue walls. This past summer Boca Raton's Jerrold Levy, rabbi of the largest Reform congregation in the South, was prosecuted for procuring underage boys in four states via the Internet. After he was convicted on one count, federal prosecutors abruptly reversed their sentencing recommendation from sixty years to six and a half, reportedly because of pressure from influential synagogue members. Several weeks ago Cantor Howard Nevison of Manhattan's famed Temple Emanu-El was arrested for an alleged two-generation-long rampage of child rape; some suspect his low bail is connected to Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau's position as a trustee of Nevison's temple.

As Law's regime wrapped a blanket around criminals in the priesthood, it swung a terrible swift sword in the direction of women aspiring to fuller participation in Catholic liturgy. Two years ago, an organization called Massachusetts Women-Church, made up primarily of lifelong-Catholic mothers and grandmothers advocating the ordination of women, was banned by Law from church-affiliated buildings. When members picketed outside a church, Law shouted at them, "You are in violation of your faith!"

Treating women as contaminants and children as invisible while coddling criminals in Roman collars allowed Boston's imperial bishopric to shore up support for Law's real goal: making a permanent move to Rome as the first American Pope. If Law had been, say, director of a daycare center or a summer camp, he would probably be on his way to jail. But with powerful people at his elbows, Law is as unlikely to serve prison time as he was to let the violated bodies of children get in the way of his career building. When Boston Catholics finally force him out, he'll probably be humming "My Way" as he packs his bags.